Randy Robinson asked me to help fix all of this. And now I'm asking you, too.

Randy is chair of the INFORMS Public Information Committee. He's a tireless advocate for improving the public stature of operations research and sees this mission as crucial for the field's long-term health and vitality. "For us to succeed in the years ahead, it is vital for our 'brand' to be strengthened," he told me. "Without a strong public awareness of operations research and its successes and potential, everything is much harder for us: keeping our courses prominent in the curriculum, securing research funding, getting executives' attention and having a seat at the table when important issues and problems are being considered."

With that, Randy convinced me to join the Public Relations Subcommittee. The committee has been working hard for a few years. Its most public work is the "Science of Better" campaign — and indeed all of us should invest a little time getting conversant in its key messages (www.orchampions.org). In addition, a great deal of its work is behind-the-scenes in trying to make O.R. more visible in the public's eye. With the help of PR agency Schwartz Communications, the committee has facilitated the placement of more than a dozen articles in the press over the last few years, including pieces in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and Business Week.

One of the hard lessons that I've learned is just how challenging it is to get articles into the mainstream business press. As a committee member, I've been privy to some less-than-pleasant exchanges with writers and editors. Here are a few excerpts that are less dismissive than most:

• "I'm not sure it makes for much of a story at all. Kind of abstract and hard to get people's attention the way it is presented"
  
  
• "This seems a little theoretical... you need results-driven software and case studies to catch my reader's attention"
  
  
• "It can't just be 'and here's some more new stuff in O.R.' There should be some overall development that pulls things together, some excuse for writing about it ... you get the idea."

Interestingly, when we succeed in getting a journalist's attention, the results can be quite positive. Over the past couple of years, I have met dozens people who were first exposed to O.R. through Virginia Postrel's "Operations Everything" article in the Boston Globe (www.dynamist.com/articles-speeches/opeds/opresearch.html). And when Steven Baker of Business Week attended the 2006 INFORMS Practice conference, he wrote about our profession in glowing terms (see www.businessweek.com/the_thread/blogspotting/archives/2006/05/why_journalists.html).

Still, the sad truth is that Baker's very positive blog about O.R., entitled "Why the Press Doesn't Cover How Things Work," also manages to succinctly explain our PR challenge: "The press covers news, stocks, companies and personalities. But try pitching a cover story on operations. People think it's ... boring."

So clearly, the PR committee has its work cut out. And we need your help. Through our work with Schwartz and the press, we have identified a handful of specific application areas where O.R. stories are likely to be of great interest to the general public, including aviation and travel, health care, financial engineering, supply chain management, homeland security and Defense, and service science, management and engineering (also known as "SSME" — see www.research.ibm.com/ssme/ for more). These stories will ultimately be "pitched" to journalists in either mainstream business press or in publications that target leaders within specific industries.

For each of these areas, we are desperately seeking a "PR Champion." This person would be either a researcher or a practitioner who is keenly aware of the spectrum of (academic and industry) work that is going on within that sub-discipline. In addition, the PR Champions are also passionate about the ability of O.R. to significantly impact the world and about helping explain this meta-story to a broader business audience. The PR Champion's objective is to regularly identify successful applications of O.R. that have generated real results (or have the potential to do so) and bringing those to the attention of the INFORMS PR Committee. To this end, the PR Champion would be responsible for "patrolling" the research journals, conferences and practitioners' communication channels in search of compelling stories and "framing" these stories by connecting the O.R. work to the business challenges and consequences within that industry. The result of these efforts will be substantially increased public recognition and a much stronger PR impact for the O.R. profession.

Beyond that, there aren't a lot of ground rules to this. Do you need to make a lifetime commitment to this job? No — just give it a try for a while and see how it goes! Are we open to having more than one PR Champion in some/all of these vertical areas? Yes! Can you "volunteer" a friend that you think would be perfect for the role? Sure! Is the PR Committee interested in hearing about O.R. application stories that don't fall into one of these groups? We're all ears (feel free to send me an e-mail to get the ball rolling).



Vijay Mehrotra (vjm@sfsu.edu) is a faculty member in the Decisions Sciences Group in the College of Business at San Francisco State University and an operations management consultant.

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